yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought

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We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’

from Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”

Bees

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Bees
Jane Hirshfield

In every instant, two gates.
One opens to fragrant paradise, one to hell.
Mostly we go through neither.

Mostly we nod to our neighbor,
lean down to pick up the paper,
go back into the house.

But the faint cries–ecstasy? horror?
Or did you think it the sound
of distant bees,
making only the thick honey of this good life?

“Bees” by Jane Hirshfield from The Lives of the Heart. © Harper Perennial, 1997.

Poetry is not just a set of techniques

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from Robert Alter The Art of Biblical Poetry

“Poetry is not just a set of techniques for saying impressively what could be said otherwise. Rather, it is a particular way of imagining the world—particular in the double sense that poetry as such has its own logic, its own ways of making connections and engendering implications, and because each system of poetry has certain distinctive semantic thrusts that follow the momentum of its formal dispositions and habits of expressions.”

ummmmmm semantic thrusts, and distinctive ones at that…..

and a small commentary on ongoing Obamania

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“[This rhetorical structure] is surely not an effort at serious historical explanation, and like any utopian statement it is accountable to history only as a projection, from the scant historical grounds for hope, of how history might be transformed.”

ok, it’s actually a quote from Robert Alter about the nature of critiques of social order in “thanksgiving” psalms, especially the royal ones. But still.

fresh images beget

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from Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, chapter three

The fact is that poetry in general involves, necessarily, a linear development of meaning, which means that in one respect it is a linear form of thinking or imagining. “Those images that yet/fresh images beget,” Yeats wrote in one of his most famous poems about art and the imagination, and that approximately, is the way most poems would seem to work: one image suggest a related one, or a further manifestation of the same underlying image; one idea leads to a cognate or consequent one; one pattern of sound, interinvolved with a particular semantic direction, leads to a similar pattern that reinforces some underlying similarity of suggestive antithesis of meaning.

The Sound of Silence

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The Sound of Silence
Elliott batTzedek

Reunion tour, two men, singing in tempo, in tune,
in time, but in no visible intimacy.
They sang how terribly strange to be
seventy—poignancy of what youth couldn’t know
dulled by pre-arranged contractual promise of an audience
coming to deliver poignancy.

Crash course of greatest duo hits, crowd sighing
none of us are young anymore remember when?
The Everly Brothers are still alive?

Then those first solo songs, all Paul,
oh what he could do with lyric and line, so fine,
so lush. So full, so complete. Then that most
familiar high tenor was suddenly there.
There, where it hadn’t been but had to be.
There, one song then the next. Each one created
unfinished. In everything an empty space
for this voice, in every foundation a crack sealed
with session takes so only one would feel
the chill wind howling through.

He left a space in everything, a space that cast
a lanky bushy-haired shadow. Those city boys,
those neighborhood boys, this loss
that only love could lose.

What my love could never lose is its dignity, gained
by struggle, gay and lesbian brought out of shadow
into space blown open for complex sexualities.
Still, when I think of the road we’ve traveled on, I wonder
what we’ve lost, why we have no word for them,
these two aging men, with their passionate love played
on stage and jumbotron every night. If they,
if I, if you, make love, and refuse to mean
a trite euphemism for genital muscle spasms,
then in place of a name for this love I have
only longing and silence. And didn’t we dream
those would shatter no more souls? But here
we are. We’ve bought the tickets and t-shirts and yet
what we clearly see confuses us. But I know
how love sounds when it’s sung, and it’s alright,
it’s all right, it’s all right. And we’re trying to get,
that’s all, that’s all, that’s all
we’re trying to get the rest.

Notes
I would never have heard the space, my ears don’t work like that. Otter heard it, it made her cry, and me too, when she explained why what I was hearing mattered. Poets are like crows, I think, gathering shiny things, a habit some call theft but crows call instinct. So the insight is Otter’s shiny thing, and the poem is mine.

This poem has been sitting in me, trying to find a shape, since 2003. That it came out now was in part triggered by watching an astounding video of Paul Simon singing “American Tune” with just his guitar on

perceptual psychologist defining structural use of poetic discourse

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1. I used to talk like this all the time, back in my UCIrvine critical theory experiment

2. Here’s what Barbara Herrnstein Smith says, which is incredibly useful:

As soon as we perceive that a verbal sequence has a sustained rhythm, that it is formally structured according to a continuously operating principle of organization, we know that we are in the presence of poetry and we respond to it accordingly […] expecting certain effects from it and not others, granting certain conventions to it and not others. One of the most significant effects of meter (or, more broadly, of principles of formal structure) in poetry is simply to inform the reader that he [sic] is being confronted by poetry and not by anything else… Meter serves, in other words, as a frame for the poem, separating it from a ‘ground’ of less highly structured speech and sound.

3. So I’ve usually written a very free verse, where what marks it as “poetry” is short lines and more metaphorical language. Do these say “poetry” to readers? Do they say enough?

4. Who are these readers who read enough poetry to know it as different from the ground when they read it?

On not taking scholarship too seriously….

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from The Art of Biblical Poetry by Robert Alter

“In the 1930s, an Orientalist, Paul Kraus, set out to show that the entire Hebrew Bible, once properly accented, could be demonstrated to have been written in verse. When he discovered two-thirds of the way through his analysis that the texts no longer bore out his thesis, he took his own life.”

ok, so I can be an intense theory-head, but jeesh. Who the heck was on his tenure review committee? Elohim the big ole’ thundering mountain war god?

They say that “Time assuages”

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Emily Dickinson

They say that “Time assuages”-
Time never did assuage-
An actual suffering strengthens
As Sinews do, with age-

Time is a Test of Trouble-
But not a Remedy-
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no Malady

wow, found this poem this evening. Didn’t know this one, and it really speaks to me right now. Time is a test of trouble….

Of Those Unwilling to Take the Bitter with the Sweet

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from Sappho fragment 146, translated by Willis Barnstone

I care for neither honey
nor the honeybee

translated by Mary Barnard

It is clear now:
Neither honey nor
the honey bee is
to be mine again